Using WebLogic’s RMI over IIOP
RMI over IIOP (or RMI-IIOP) enables Java-based RMI objects to interoperate with CORBA-based application components. By using the OMG standard IIOP as the underlying transport protocol, Java clients can invoke CORBA objects, and likewise, CORBA clients can remotely invoke RMI objects. CORBA components may be written in a variety of languages, including C++, Smalltalk, Java, COBOL, and many more. RMI-IIOP combines the ease of use of RMI with cross-language interoperability provided by the CORBA/IIOP architecture.
WebLogic’s RMI-IIOP implementation provides several options for implementing Java-based RMI and CORBA/IDL clients:
- Standalone RMI clients
You can implement an RMI client that uses the JDK’s IIOP implementation. This is ORB-based, and will not use any WebLogic libraries. As a result, the client can be kept quite trim, although this approach cannot make use of J2EE features such as transactions.
- WebLogic fat clients
By simply changing the context factory used in the standalone RMI client, and including weblogic.jar, you can create a client that still communicates using IIOP, but doesn’t use a client-side ORB. Instead, it uses an optimized WebLogic-specific RMI-IIOP implementation. As a result, the client is faster and more scalable, and can benefit from WebLogic features. Of course, the client will be quite large now.
- J2EE clients
J2EE clients are application clients that are typically bundled with J2EE applications. These clients make use ...